Bexar appoints two to VIA board

Bobby Perez is a former city councilman who's now with Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

SAN ANTONIO — Two people with professional ties to the VIA Metropolitan Transit Authority were appointed to the VIA board on Tuesday by Bexar County commissioners, replacing members whose terms had ended.

After four of the five applicants were interviewed, commissioners unanimously approved the appointments of Rebecca Q. Cedillo, president of Strategic Initiatives Consulting and former vice president of planning/chief of water resources for the San Antonio Water System; and Bobby Perez, former San Antonio councilman and now senior vice president general counsel corporate relations for Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

They replace Rick Pych and Mary Briseño as two of the three county appointees on the 11-member VIA board.

Like Perez, Pych works for the Spurs, as president of business operations. Briseño is the wife of the newly appointed VIA board chairman, Alex Briseño.

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“As you know, it's not the easiest board to serve on,” County Judge Nelson Wolff said during one of the interviews.

Later Tuesday, Perez attended his first VIA meeting in his new role. He worked as a lobbyist for VIA during legislative sessions for about a decade and as recently as last year.

Cedillo is an urban planner who worked as a subcontractor for VIA planning staff as the transit agency developed its long-range plan in 2010.

She is currently a subcontractor for a company, HNTB, that has worked on VIA's streetcar project. Cedillo said her role has been “minimal” with HNTB but she plans to resign the position now that she's on the VIA board.

Cedillo also is a member of the University Health Systems board, where she serves with Alex Briseño; both are county appointees to UHS.

He is resigning from the UHS board effective Monday; Cedillo said she also will resign from the UHS board because it meets on the same night as VIA.

Briseño and Cedillo also previously worked together when he was San Antonio city manager and she was the city's director of planning.

As a consultant, Cedillo previously worked as a policy analyst for VIA's senior vice president of public engagement Charlie Gonzalez when he still was a congressman.

Cedillo said she supports the VIA streetcar, but also believes there needs to be a focus on improving the transportation for people who live in the county's more outlying areas. Perez said he needs more time to study the streetcar issue.

Other action

In other action Tuesday, commissioners approved a resolution that opposes bills like Arizona's Senate Bill 1070, similar to one passed by San Antonio in 2010.

That year, Arizona passed a controversial law that, critics say, encourages racial profiling. Since then, dozens of other bills have been introduced. In the last session of the Texas Legislature, two bills were proposed that “did things to mirror aspects of SB 1070,” said Seth Mitchell, assistant to the county manager.

The resolution urges the Texas governor and Legislature “to refrain from passing a law that targets individuals on basis of race, ethnicity or national origin and endangers the protection of constitutional rights.”

Pct. 2 Commissioner Paul Elizondo, who requested the resolution, said he opposes requiring law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws.

“They're not trained for it and have other things to do,” he said. “If someone is here illegally, they should be deported. But we need to stay away from these laws. All they do is divide the people of this state.”

Also Tuesday, three women addressed commissioners and asked them, for the second time, to take measures like the city of San Antonio did in the '80s to keep unaccompanied children under age 13 from concerts with “obscene material” in county-owned facilities.

The idea was sparked by Miley Cyrus' recent concert at the AT&T Center, which the county owns but doesn't operate.

All three speakers addressed Cyrus' “sexually explicit actions,” her apparent promotion of recreational marijuana use and handed commissioners graphic photos of Cyrus' performance.

Dorothy Godines, a youth minister, theology student and San Antonio Family Association member, said that earlier in the meeting, officials showed they support child welfare by signing a proclamation naming April “Child Abuse Prevention Month.”

“If we are for the fiscal welfare of children, we should also be there for the psychological and mental welfare of children,” she said. “There were things in that concert that children should not have been exposed to.”

Wolff responded that the county doesn't have ordinance-making powers, but that he expressed concerns to the Spurs Sports & Entertainment, which operates the AT&T Center.

“There's not much else we can do,” he said. “Parents need to know what she does, and they're crazy for taking their kids there, that's all I can say.”

Eva Ruth Moravec is a freelance reporter who writes about officer-involved shootings of unarmed individuals in Texas for a grant-funded series published in several Texas newspapers. She is also currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Moravec covered the 2015 Texas legislative session for the Associated Press and has freelanced for local, state and national news outlets, including the New York Times and The Washington Post. Previously, Moravec worked for several years as a staff reporter covering public safety and later government for the San Antonio Express-News. Read her complete series at www.pointofimpacttx.org.